March 25, 2010

Long Live the 25th March 1821

75 comments:

All countries (except for the most base, like North Korea) have a stake in Greece's survival, since Greece has contributed so much to the world. This is why as long as humanity exists, Greece will exist.

Dude their achievements were over 2000 years ago. Most advanced places had long/multiple golden eras. For instance China's longevity, the middle east and the birth of civilization along with the Islamic era, ancient Italy the Renaissance American modern Italy, Germans as a leader in science for the last 400 years and if not for globalization probably would be much longer. I can see that all the above have good genes because when given opportunities in America to do well they succeed. What I cannot understand is how the ancient Greeks did so much and yet the modern Greeks seem nothing of the like.

" princenuadha said... Dude their achievements were over 2000 years ago. Most advanced places had long/multiple golden eras. For instance China's longevity, the middle east and the birth of civilization along with the Islamic era, ancient Italy the Renaissance American modern Italy, Germans as a leader in science for the last 400 years and if not for globalization probably would be much longer. I can see that all the above have good genes because when given opportunities in America to do well they succeed. What I cannot understand is how the ancient Greeks did so much and yet the modern Greeks seem nothing of the like."

Many great achievements done by different peoples after the ancient Greeks owe something to ancient Greece and other civilizations. The modern Greeks are partaking of same chain of accomplishment as anyone else.

I can tell you from personal experience that many modern Greeks have done a lot. The modern Greeks in my life as a whole have forcefully instilled education into their children. I went to Greek school and American school at the same time. There is a great love of education in the Greek-American community and in Greek communities elsewhere. Greeks per capita are economically successful in America and elsewhere. My parents were almost always self-employed--another apparent love of modern Greeks, self-employment, owning their own businesses.

Aside from just pondering such developments I only want to suggest that you not focus so much on teaching your kids Greek history and instead teach them science, economics, philosophy, writting and so on. Pride can burden a whole group of people.

A culture is an idea and an institution by which people live by; it is not enough to say that ancient Greece has effected later cultures and therefore Greece as a nation lives on. If you thought that way you might as well have broken Greece into all of its contributors the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hittites, and more. You could further break down devolpments in Greece to the individuals who, for instance, made the advancmens in science and the friendships and other personal relations that effected them uniquely. Then you consider all the events that brought there lives together. You can add all the other biographical happenings that effected them, such as moving by the sea, having an apple fall on their head, seeing a swinging lantern at a certain moment. After all this cause effect type thinking you loose the concept of Greece.

If things continue as they have Greece will only live through the history books and a people who wear certain flags and own restaurants and other little businesses.

In no way do the Germans even come close to the Greeks. Nor do they resemble them in their achievements. The psyche of the classical and other Greeks is just much more refined than that of the Germans. The Greeks are shaped by many things. Their mythology, philosophy, taste for beauty, language, geography, climate, their very true nature...and many other factors have shaped the image of the Greeks.

The Germans, regardless of all their achievements in the last centuries(and there are many), have a very different image which is somewhat lacking in colour from an aesthetic point of view. You see, it's not what you do, but HOW you do it. And the Germans just lack style.

BTW what makes you think the last achievements of the Greeks were 2000 years ago? Can't quite remember the name of the German king in the 10th century who went to Constantinople to marry a Greek princess, but was refused because he was considered 'barbarian'.

I see what ur saying... I was basically just talking about technology because that is what I was concerning myself with at the moment. Technology is a usefully tool in comparing cultures as it relates to their instructional/experimental knowledge (science), methods of gaining knowledge and what it means (philosophy), and the stratification within a culture (learned jobs). Science and technology is nearly a universal measure of a culture as the progression within each of the cultures is fairly easy to map and compare with others. I would argue that part of humanity is the striving of more technology and as it gives us advantage over others and "nature".

That being said I think you are right that the Greeks have a beauty in their golden era that the Germans have not. One example, greek mythology describes human relations and their place much more beautifuly than most modern literature and psychology. I'm no historian but I would love to travel to Greece a little over 2000 years ago to see how great it really was.

greek mythology describes human relations and their place much more beautifuly than most modern literature and psychology

Here you are comparing apples and oranges. A much more appropriate comparison scheme would be between Greek mythology and German(ic) mythology, which is unfortunately impossible because of the scarcity of surviving written German or Germanic mythological records compared to the Greek ones, which are relatively abundant despite the Christian suppression.

In a sense, all of us who live in the modern civilized world are Greek and Roman; just as all of us who share an Abrahamic cultural heritage (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Samaritan, Bahai, etc.), whether recent or ancient, are in a sense Jew.

The "Abrahamic cultural heritage" predates what we think of as Judaism, which itself is a cobbling together of several near eastern religious traditions and writings. Judaism for the past two millennia is night and day different from that of say the period of Moses (when Hebrew groups took the god Yahweh from other extant monotheist groups and melded it with the Egyptian theology they had adopted) and the period of Joshua and the period of the importation of masses of Persian theology into Judaism, and then the Temple based religion that was Judaism. And lots of historians of religion would say synagogue Judaism (vs temple Judaism) is an offshoot of Greek culture, and rabbinic Judaism (again vs temple Judaism) is younger than Christianity.

I posted this to Rokus blog, but perhaps it could be useful also here, seeing that many ignore the last findings on Jewish religion and history:

"Rokus, glad to know you have a blog. I saw you gave some credit to the ancientness of the Jewish R-L4 and to Tut’s R-haplogroup as a (likely) Jewish one. I wouldn’t be so sure. All your theory is based on the reliability of the Jewish history based on the Bible. Unfortunately things aren’t so. After having read “The Invention of the Jewish People” by Shlomo Sand (I reviuwed on Amazon.com) and the book of a teacher of the Pontificia Università Lateranense (P. Merlo, La religione dell’antico Israele), I think I can surely adfirm that:1) Nothing of the Jewish history from Abraham to Moses is reliable: pure myth. There are no introgression by an archeological point of view into the Palestine.2) No reliability of the Kings period. No trace of the Solomon’s Temple. The kingdom more powerful before the exile was that of Israel in the North, that hadn’t anything to do with the Southern one (Judah).3) There is no monotheism of YHWH before the exile: there was a politheism in Judah’s kingdom and YHWH had a wife (Asherah) like the contemporaneous religions.4) The YHWH’s monotheism was created by the Sodocite cast returned from Babylon, inspired by the Persian religion, as well as the Bible we know. Etc. etc.

About this reconstruction agree the leftist Jew Sand and the catholic Merlo, who probably hopes to save the other myth, that of Jesus. Difficult, I think. For me it is a game already lost. Lost in the beginning.

It remains our Genetics, I hope to be thought only by a scientific point of view. Proofs, proofs, only proofs, dear Rokus. See how wreched is my old enemy, also with a smart guy like Argiedude.

Onur, I don't believe that Jesus was the son of God and of the Vergin Mary, and I don't believe he resurrected after his death, but I am sure of his existence. If you read the book of James Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty (and others), it is clear that he had four brothers and at least two sisters, that after his death the brother James began the leader of his movement at Jerusalem, and after his death other brothers who had sons etc. etc. Probably the true followers of Jesus were the Ebionites. Cristianity as we know is a creation of Saint Paul and of century of discussions, stakes, persecutions against Greek philosophy, science etc. I can adfirm for certain that Jesus wasn't a Christian, but a pious Jew of his time. And for all this I hope that all this ends soon.

"the three religions shared many roots and that these stem from Zoroastrianism".

I very much suspect that to be so. However the festival at the first full moon after the equinox hints very strongly at a planting festival, so it's probably even more ancient than Zoroaster. Most people without a solar calendar plant by the moon. 'Primitive' astronomers knew that the weather would get warmer after the equinox (colder down here because it's an Autumn festival in the southern hemisphere) so it was time to plant.

"I don't think Moses, Joshua, the Patriarchs and even David and Solomon are historical people"

Actually Israel Finkelstein has a good argument that David is historical. In his book 'David and Solomon' (I think it's called that) he suggests that Solomon is a mythical example of a 'wise King', but David was probably a minor hill chieftain who offered his services as a mercenary variously to the Egyptians (Philistines in that region) or to a minor king (Saul) in the Yisrael Valley who was trying to gain independence from the Egyptians. The others you mention, along with Abraham, are almost certainly mythical.

"And for all this I hope that all this ends soon".

I don't think there's much chance of that. Too many people have too much vested in keeping it all going.

It captures an argument between two friends, Jewish, who run into each other in Montreal in 1948. One friend is an atheist and the other very religious. The argument takes place on beautiful Mount Royal in Montreal.

I see that someone else loves this movie too. It's posted in 9 parts on Youtube.

Yes, but Tolerance is the result of the Open Societies of the Western World after more than one thousand years of Religious Wars,of persecution of Science and Phylosophy, of murdered Ipazias, after Humanism and Renaissance, after many Galileos. And I can say only:

The Italian of Machiavelli is of course the Italian of the Renaissance. "ruini" is the actual "rovini", Subjunctiv present of "rovinare" = "to ruin" of the same origin. By chance is the name of Cardinal Ruini.

But the meaning is much much more. Take, please, a translation of "Il Principe" and read (the whole book of course).

Onur, if you have read some posting of mine in the past, perhaps you know I don't like who hides himself behind a nickname: my name is Gioiello Tognoni and only one person in the world takes this name: me. Who are you?

I quoted James Tabor because I think his is a good book and the story of The tomb of the Shroud, of the James' ossuary etc. should be investigated seriously. Now is the day of the Turin shroud!Anyway what Tabor, Ehrman etc. are writing now was already written many many years ago by, for instance, Ambrogio Donini, a marxist, my master on Religion. These aren't news. We know these facts from many time and knew them Vanini, Giordano Bruno and many others that Christians burnt.

Then you are a Turk. Hope that you aren't like Occhiai (perhaps you don't understand, but if you were, by chance,"quel rompicoglioni svedese", you certainly would understand). We amateurs have a YDNA and a mtDNA: mine is R1b1b2a (S136+) and K1a1b1 (I am waiting for the next 12 my FGS). And yours? If you are a Turk certainly your data would be very interesting.

About Jesus I think it isn't interesting if he was a real man or not. Most important is that he wasn't the God's son and didn't resurrect. If all Europeans begin to think this I think that many things would change. And you, as a Turk, in what do you believe? In Allah?

Gioiello, you almost cannot find me on the Internet, as I don't have a website, or a photo, bio or CV, etc. of mine uploaded to the Internet, or even a Facebook or Twitter account. Only publicly visible thing I do on the Internet is to write on a handful of forums and blogs, mostly under the name of "onur", there is nothing else you can find about me on the Internet. Btw, my surname is Dincer (as I already stated, c is with cedilla), not Dencer.

I am wondering the reason of your curiosity about me.

As to the origin of my first name, the French "honneur" was deliberately transformed into the Turkic-sounding "onur" by some of the state officials (probably including academicians) working for the state-sponsored Turkish Language Remorm (TLR) of the 1930s Turkey in order to sell it to the official TLR Committee, whose aim was to replace Turkish words of foreign origin (including Arabic, Persian, Greek, Armenian and of course French among others) with words that have Turkic word roots (most of which were neologisms). Another criterion was that the neologisms must have complied with the Turkish vowel harmony rules (only words of Turkic origin are expected to comply with the Turkish vowel harmony rules in Turkish, not words of foreign origin, e.g., "fatih", a Turkish word of Arabic origin, doesn't comply with the Turkish vowel harmony rules). The French "honneur" was artificially transformed into "onur" by some state officials working for the TLR to meet these criteria, as there is by chance a Turkic root "on" and a Turkic suffix "-ur", which are expectedly completely unrelated to the French word "honneur" (or its Latin form "honor") and its meaning, and the word "onur", unlike the word "honneur", complies with the Turkish vowel harmony rules. So, depite its obvious French origin, its newly coined version "onur" somehow managed to be passed as a word of "Turkic origin" in the circles of the TLR officials. Though this may have to do with the similarly state-sponsored Sun Language Theory of the 1930s Turkey, which proposed that all human languages are ultimately descended from Ancient Turkic language. Thus this theory created a more inclusive and positive atmosphere for Turkish words of foreign origin and foreign word borrowing with the progress of time in the 1930s and beyond. In short, your conjecture of a Latin connection directly or via Balkan languages going back to remote past, i.e., before the modern era (btw, modern era begins in the 19th century in the Ottoman lands), is certainly wrong, but the state officials behind the coinage of "onur" may have also been influenced by the Latin - and even English - version of the French "honneur".

Btw, you still haven't answered my question about the meaning of the word "occhiai". I guess it is a personal name.

"Occhiai" was a nickname of a Turk as you, who wrote sometimes to me, and I suspected he really was this "Johan Hagman", as I suspect you are the same "Johan". As I have said many times I don't like these "rompicoglioni". I unmasked him writing some sentences in Turkish language. Really a wanderful language, even though it is absurd to think it is the "mothertongue" of all the languages of the world (in the past they thought the same for Hebrew etc.). Certainly I believe in the monogenesis of the languages or, at least, in the Nostratic theory, then to a link between Altaic languages and Indo-European ones.

If you are Johan, certainly your knowledge of Turk has progressed now and it would be difficult for me to unmask you.

Dear Gioiello, I know neither Italian nor Swedish, I only know Turkish (my mother tongue) and English (from school years). Additionally, I know - mostly from Internet research - the phonology, orthography and pronunciation rules of some languages (mostly European and Middle Eastern languages, and including Italian btw) with varying degrees of proficiency depending on the language.

I think I know how to convince you that I am not Johan or Occhiai and I am really Onur Dincer.

The above is a link to a thread of a blog to which I have been sending posts for the last two years under the name of "onur". As soon as you enter the page, you will notice how an enormous number of my posts I deleted before settling on a final revision. You should already have noticed my habit of deleting my posts consecutively until finally fixing on a last revision. In case the month names appear on your screen in their Turkish forms, I should inform you in advance that "Mart" means "March" and "Nisan" means "April" in Turkish.

As another proof that I am really Onur Dincer and not someone else and certainly not Johan or Occhiai, and this time including my surname, I want to forward to you some of my emails I sent last year to the owner of the blog I linked above. In them, you'll see that their sender email address consists of my first name and surname with the last two digits of my birth year and that the recipient email address is the same with the email address of the blog owner, which is displayed in his blog above his photo. Of course, I must first learn your email address.

As to the Sun Language Theory, of course it is, and was, absurd, and because of that it was abandoned during the 1940s.

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